Dung Day: what a cow-dung floor taught me about finding value in what everyone else calls waste

Every Friday at Mahemas Primary, the whole school arrived carrying a bag of cow dung and a jerrican of water. It was not punishment. It was maintenance. Mixed with water into a paste and smoothed across the floor by hand, dung dries into a clean, hard, cool surface that keeps the dust and the ants down, a piece of practical engineering my community had been using for generations, long before anyone in a boardroom invented a word like 'circular economy' for the same idea.

The world had decided that cow dung was the lowest, most worthless substance imaginable. My village looked at that exact same material and saw a building resource, a floor, a renewable, self-repairing surface that cost nothing but labor. The matter did not change between those two views. Only the eye looking at it, and the need driving the looking, changed.

I have carried that lesson into everything since. I have spent my career treating things other people considered worthless, a poor kid's story, a cheap phone and a bedsheet as a cinema screen, an audience nobody else wanted, as raw material, as floor, as the substance of something worth building.

We plastered our homes with it too, not just the school. A freshly sealed dung floor at home was a point of pride for a mother, read by a visitor the way a city guest reads polished tile: as a sign that the people here cared for their home and kept it well.

Worth, I learned kneeling on that floor as a child, is not a property of the thing itself. It is a property of the relationship between the thing and the person who needs it. Nothing is truly waste to someone resourceful and hungry enough to look at it properly.